A Delima, Fire, Email and The Morning Paper

I want to get up tomorrow early and do some things, so I don't want to take a sleeping pill tonight. However, I dont want to have another night like I had last night, in which I spent half of it awake, tossing and turning. I'm not sure what I will do about this. If I take the pill, I know from experience that I'll probably sleep until 11:00 or 12:00. Decisions, decisions.

I got a nice email from my half-sister in South Carolina this evening. She told me that she is getting married this weekend. This is so sudden, but I am very happy for her. She deserves a good man.The last one was such a lying, cheating scumbag.

I also got a nice email from my mother. She was thinking of me because she looked out the kitchen window and my dad was out at the fire ring burning some brush and was leaning on his rake, staring into the fire. She knows how much I love a good bon fire. She wished I was there right then, so she wrote. Aren't mothers great?

Setting up my tent in the back yard to dry it out this morning had me thinking about an old ritual of mine and my brother's. When Columbus had a morning paper, The Citizen's Journal to be exact, he was a paper boy. He was about eleven and I was fourteen. In the summer on Friday nights we would sleep out in the family tent in the back yard, and at 4:00 AM I would go to deliver papers with him. We rode all over our small, one traffic light farm town on our bikes. We had the run of the place. We were the only ones up in the whole town except for the baker, who gave us free donuts, and the mortician, who scared the hell out of us when he would come to the door to retrieve the paper. Who knows why he was up at that hour, fully dressed in a three-piece suit, you know? Creepy.

After delivering the papers we would go back to the tent, eat donuts and read the paper by flashlight. Not the whole paper- just the copmics and the almanac. We would have discussions about the almanac- what planets were in the night sky, the big historical events, how many days were left in the calendar year, how many days until harvest. We would do this until dawn would creep in, at which point we would nestle back into our sleeping bags and snooze until about 9:00 AM. Ah, good times...

Everyone have a great evening. Remember when...